Wheat has long been generally used in connection with preparing and cooking foods. However, the use of wheat as a food in and of itself has not been fully accepted. Some of the reasons for this non-acceptance are the long cooking time which raw wheat requires, the leathery feel of cooked wheat in the mouth, and its pronounced bran-like flavor. These undesirable properties are primarily attributed to the bran portion of the wheat.
Various attempts have been made to remove the bran from wheat such as using prolonged soaking and cooking periods, followed by drying, then partial debranning in abrasive mills, and finally debranning in Burr mills. Other attempts include partial debranning by scouring the wheat kernels, partial debranning by abrasion of the damp wheat kernels, prolonged soaking followed by pressure cooking and drying.
In general, these approaches have not been generally effective or acceptable as the end products exhibited only slight improvement over raw wheat, the methods used required prolonged treatment periods and could only be carried out on small batches, and the mouth feel of the end product was unacceptable.
Additional approaches employing bulgur wheat required soaking, precooking and treating the wheat with caustic soda solutions. In some of these processes, a 25% caustic soda solution was used, while in others a lower concentration was used since it was believed that the caustic soda concentration affected the taste of the end product. However, it was found that this hot treatment with caustic soda generally affected the taste and also tended to affect the color of the end product thereby also necessitating a bleaching process.